Re: Talking to a syslog server

The problem with IBM i is there are too many places to collect the data, then format the feed as needed. IBM global services in Rochester created a toolkit to do just that.

Robert Anderson(? Last name) created it and it work really well. A slight bit pricey but it’s cheaper that rolling your own if you take into account staff time to do it.


Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On Oct 16, 2024, at 6:10 PM, Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Evan,

Am 16.10.2024 um 20:31 schrieb Evan Harris <auctionitis@xxxxxxxxx>:

To be fair, the data and events from the IBM i are more complex than a SAN is likely to be IMO.

This has nothing to do with SAN vs. IBM i, or complexity of events and messages. It's just a different approach to essentially the same thing: Generate a log about more or less relevant things happening on a given system.

Syslog historically is a simple mechanism mostly found on UNIX like systems to log arbitrary text sent from any application program either locally to a text file, or to a remote server for further processing. The syslog mechanism just adds a time stamp and optionally the program name, and process ID. Syslog knows facilities and a severity level for easier diversion of categories to separate log files. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syslog for further details.

IBM i logging uses central databases to hold predefined texts and optionally can fill variables. There's more to it but I believe that this is well-known in this group. Funnily, Windows NT and onwards uses a similar approach with the Event Logger.

Having to only code the errmsgid and pass some relevant details is much easier than to come up with consistent logging message appearance over many points in the code where log messages are generated. This is an issue especially in background applications with no interactive interface.

IBM has AFAIR just not yet managed to implement code to optionally send (preparsed) QHST entries to a syslog server. Maybe this could be implemented fairly easy with an exit program being called whenever a QHST entry is added? Sending text within a UDP packet is not that hard. Adding comfortable configuration screens is probably the majority of work.

:wq! PoC

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